Interviewed from Elea Himmelsbach

03.2009

Elea Himmelsbach: About six month ago you passed me on a TV talk-show script, which you named 'open confess' . In this script you are concerned with discussing to different perspectives of the question: 'how to act and if to act’. Could you tell us about these two perspectives you choose to discuss this concern and how they relate to your ongoing artistic concerns?

Yorgo Manis: I guess that the whole idea came out of a need for a honest dualistic existential discourse with  myself. I enjoy the potential of human's awareness, to re-evaluate its present state by asking philosophical questions, like this one I set on cultural activism. Art though, is something not so abstract and metaphysical as existence or religion but can still be quite fluid and complex to make our life difficult but cool at the same time. In that sense everyday I am struggling with the inner voices of John (the male of this talk show couple), screaming for a straight forward, fist fight, cultural activism and the cynical, indifferent, cultural actions of Anna. While confessing their own truths and trying to find out the reasons they are not together anymore, they form and reform unavoidably my approach in art's understanding and positioning. I sometimes feel closer to John's ideas, but then Anna comes to remind me that I am too romantic, naïve, fashionable and narcissistic. Other times I prefer and wave my head with what Anna says but then John makes me feel cynical, dry, guilty and lazy. The thing is, that it's not only about their ideas.  As a spectator I get from them a weird feeling too, as they seem to mislead themselves, by talking about irrelevant things and not about the split of their relationship per se. That's why their arguments although political are mostly emotional and although honest are greatly spectacular. So it seems to me that weather they are right or wrong, seems of small interest, rather than why did they feel the need for this kind of spectacular confess dialogue anyway. In their world everything seems dualistic; every duality splits and forms another duality, every certainty creates a paradox and for every paradox John and Anna seems to be there and argue about it, around a circle of an enthusiastic crowd and a dozen of video cameras, haunting my thoughts forever and letting Jane (the hostess of the show) and Paul (the psychoanalyst) trying to regenerate a balance between all these. This constant, exhausting, though spectacular try of them for a balanced morality through a cathartic confess, is the one that guides my art practice and reflects itself, through the existence or non existence of my art works.

EH: The basis of your images are often informed by findings in the web, which you then later put through various modification processes. Could you tell a few words about your working method and how it links to the two positions, Anna and John?

YM: That's true, the web platform of internet, although shuttle and transparent sometimes in the works, seems very important for my art practice. In a way I found in it's democratic functionality, what Andy Warhol found when he moved in New York and was surrounded by the capitalistic background of the 60's America. The same browsers are used for every one, rich or poor and not even for America this time, but for the whole world. All you need is to connect and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by the numerous amount of imagery that can form your global understanding of reality. Connections doesn't stop there, internet is a very cynical tool in the same way that capitalism is, but paradoxically is full of sentiments in the same way that advertisement is too. This post-pop attitude is translated by finding globally popular imagery on internet browsers, making collages on a Richard Hamilton manner or sometimes just using them as ready mades in the same way that Roy Lychtenstein or Warhol did. Never the less, I prefer to work allegorical and create fairy tales or gosts out of it, avoiding a functional and immediate dependence to create internet art.

Unlike Andy Warhol though and pop artists, who embraced uncritically and celebrated the 'democracy' and superficiality of capitalism with one dimensional works full of exaggeration, I celebrate Internet's perspective for reality, though a cynical romanticism which looks for an interconnected moral balance. I can avoid reality you see, drown into the digital, metaphysical space of Internet but I can't avoid the voices of Anna, and John. They keep me busy with their constant try to stay in the middle of the road by setting different critical powers together, making them crash and become neutralized. They can put together a chain mail of social awareness, next to a friend add of facebook, an amazon product order and a wish on wishtree.org. They start to deconstruct and construct again and again this fluid form of imagery or information, recreating sometimes simple or other times more complex composition, trying always to achieve a metaphysical balance that will reflect the sentimentality of a successful popular moral. This can be quite exhausting and seem quite meaningful in the process but whether and on what level, can be rational or irrational, political correct or not, is of small interest. The try itself is that matters. Like Pop art works they are not there to explain things, they are there to reflect sentimentally their own Zeitgeist, to document what's out there from their perspective, but doing that in such a complex society seems already enough for a doing. Critique, either you want it or not follows unavoidably anyway.

EH: It seems that sentimentality is a very strong motivation for your practice and that you treat it as a contemporary social phenomenon in media mediation. Your paintings, especially the last ones from the series of the hunters appear to oscillate between a celebration of sentimentality and a notion that aims to uncover it by the same token. Confession, which had been an active notion in the 'open confess' TV-script has become a passive concept in the hunter series The subjects in the paintings seem not to be aware that they reveal something personal, while posing with the trophy, the hunted animal. Do you consider the sloppy potential of the animal as a metaphor for an uncritical sentimentality that is embedded in a nostalgic archetypical desire?

YM: Yes, to begin with, the idea of sentimentality triggers my interest for its positioning beyond criticality, ethics and intellectual judgment. It looks in a way untouchable and archetypal as you already suggested, bonded with a perverted insistent desire to desire. Paradoxically though, it works as a motivational tool, not only for contemporary advertisement but for politics, art or even power and social relationships of the mundane. Specifically though I am interested about a 'new sentimental order' that starts to appear after the existence of the global interconnection and internet. In this last series you referred to, I am exploring this sentimental balance, picking up imagery of hunting resorts websites, where families can go for vacation and at the same time have a hunting experience. This frozen family moment, sitting around the trophy and posing for a photographic souvenir, next to this idealistic landscape for me generates many ambiguous sentiments. It is this ambiguity that tries to reveal the insistent try for a popular balanced morality, a cynical romanticism full of individual desires and sweet suffering.

EH: Yet the cynical attitude attributes also a very specific notion of self-reflexivity that complicates the direct sentimental potential of the imageries. I am curious, is the constant aim to balance out binary compositions, -that appears again and again in your work-, an aim to neutralize your subject matter politically, in the sense that an 'over sentimentalized' representation would render it perhaps impossible for any critical discourse?  Could you expand on the way or ways you consider this configuration of a 'new sentimental order', in your work, specifically in regards to the material translation? I.e. it seems that your way of configuring your images does not only take a discussion of found material into account, but that the ways of how you process your concept in material terms possesses a very specific significance.

YM: Todays signs are more complex than ever in their moral and political understanding. Understanding what a simple pair of Adidas or Nike represents and how many politico-ethical issues float around it, seems already extremely complex to deal with, not only for a common consumer but even for critics or the imaginary person that produces them. In the end of the day it’s just a pair of shoes and they look nice, so what a hell, why not? Everything seems to carry an extreme amount of critical information, positive or negative. We, as critical consumers, are in between trying to sentimentalize this chaos. Now, if there is an offer and the 10% of the price goes to Africa or another charity, makes things even more complex. It seems that my art practice asks what if the fuel that drives our actions in the end of the day, is pure eclectic sentimentality. Is a mixture of what is left of the American dream and our new mission to save the world. With the introduction of the Internet, information and as an extend sentimentality starts to get a common space and a universal language. In this moment images don’t seem of main need, what seems more important are the concepts and how we interpret them. This is what I see as the New Sentimental Order. In my eyes, sentimentality could be the driving force of our century, because it seems really something beyond logic but still so human. Critical positions don’t seem appropriate anymore. There are now critical sentiments, reformed every second depending to hour instant mood and needs and internet seems the ideal environment for such a world. A determined idea seems condemned to fail before even it starts. It can only survive, if it can be easily interpreted, juxtaposed, misunderstood and distorted, the more generic and chaotic the better. But what is always stable are the sentiments and realizing this, maybe is not so bad after all. I guess this is what my artworks try to reflect, by accepting their fakeness of an authentic need, while still trying to balance morally and be completely honest by letting their sentiments free. They stand autonomously as a collection of a universal memoir.

EH: Could we relate this more directly to your work? I.e. one of the dominant formal characteristics of your work is that you render your subjects recognizable through a color device that functions like a signature, consisting of ‘neon green, black, white, gold and brown’. How does this relate to your concept of a ‘new sentimental order’ and what significance has this specific choice of colors for you?

YM: Well I guess that this constant use has to do with the power of colour. We know already that colour plays a significant role in nature, for example roses are red in stead of protecting themselves from being eaten from animals and to reveal the existence of high lever in poisonous cyanide in their substances. So somehow red is related with the forbidden or giving the attention to stop. Now someone can argue that after industrialization, colour lost this significance and it became independent but I could argue that still there are subconscious motivations that drive our sentiments on colours under ideal circumstances and this is something that advertisement knows and uses very well. So if colour cant have a meaning but at least a sentimental significance and functionality, then everything can be translated though colours or at least colour can be an additional tool for propaganda. As a result the colours you mentioned above seem to consist at the moment the elements of my own personal flag for this ‘new sentimental order’. It looks in my eyes, as the colour recipe for a successfully cooked meal called cynical romanticism.